This Is Not a Spoiler

Sometimes I just want to say, "See this movie!", without any explanations. Hugo is one of those movies.

But this is a review, so I have to give you something. I'll give you this: Hugo is enchanting. It's magical. And like all magic tricks, the less you know about it, the better. But unlike the

typical magic trick, this story is true. And that's quite a trick for a story that begins with a little boy who lives in a train station.

Director Martin Scorsese is known for his dramatic edge, so it comes as quite a surprise to see him making a holiday film with a PG rating and a children's theme. Don't let that theme and rating deceive you, however; this film is a masterpiece of subtle allusion, deep emotion, and satisfying metaphor.

In many respects Hugo is a paean to movie making itself — which raises the film far above the typical holiday release. Watch for allusions to great movies of the silent era. Even Hugo 's setting inside a train station is a tribute to the very first motion picture, which simply showed a train pulling out of a station. Audiences jumped out of their seats in terror, thinking they would be hit by the speeding object. That's the magic of illusion. And fear of a speeding train is part of the magic in Hugo.

Scorsese's decision to film Hugo in 3-D is also a tribute to the pioneers of movie making, who went to great lengths to create a sense of depth and reality in their films. Hugo reveals some of the early tricks, thus becoming a history of cinematic art as well as a great piece of art itself.

Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a boy of about eight who lives behind the walls of a Paris train station during the 1930s. Unbeknownst to the people in the station below him, he takes care of the numerous clocks by winding them daily and fixing their works when they wear out or break. From his ceiling roost he watches the quirky, almost cartoonish characters below him, and he watches over them as well.

To the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), however, Hugo is just one of many little street urchins who pilfer food from the station shops and belong in the local orphanage. The Inspector has been injured in the war and wears a mechanical brace on his leg. He, too, is broken — almost like Hans Christian Andersen's "Steadfast Tin Soldier." His character is both menacing and endearing, especially when he gears up the courage to talk to the station's flower-shop girl (Emily Mortimer).

Hugo can fix anything — clocks, windup toys, and even a robotic "automaton" that his father (Jude Law) has found in a museum. His vision of the world as a giant machine brings comfort to him in his loneliness. "There is never an extra piece in a machine," he tells a young girl who befriends him (Chloe Grace Moretz). "Every part has a purpose. So I must have a purpose too."

In a sense, Scorsese is that little boy who can fix things. With the magic of film he rights a wrong that was perpetrated almost a hundred years ago. And he does it with a film that is wondrous, luminous, and entertaining.

Go see Hugo. Let the magic envelop you. Get caught up in its tale of dreams brought to life. Then spend a few minutes on the internet finding out how the trick was done. You will be astounded to learn the background of this amazing story. But I won't give you a single hint until you've seen the show for yourself.

Jo Ann Skousen teaches classic mythology and Bible literature at Chapman University. She is the entertainment editor for Liberty and founding director of the Anthem Libertarian Film Festival at FreedomFest, which she co-produces with her husband, Mark Skousen. Her recent book, Matriarchs of the Messiah: Valiant Women in the Lineage of Jesus Christ, offers a bold new look at women in the Bible.

A Cure for What Doesn’t Ail You

The Obama Regime is best known for its crony car and crony green energy capitalism, but there is scarcely any industry it hasn’t tried to corrupt for its own interests.

An unlikely source has now informed us of an especially egregious new variety — what can only be described as crony drug capitalism.

The LA Times — yes, savor that! — reports that another billionaire backer of Obama, Ronald O. Perelman, was able to get a no-bid contract from the government for some dubious vaccine produced by his New York-based company, Siga Technologies. The money involved is Solyndra scale: Perelman’s company will get $433 million in taxpayer cash.

The drug is supposedly a cure for smallpox, if you are unlucky enough — extremely unlucky — to contract it (see below).

Perelman’s company, Siga, put Obama’s close associate and major supporter, Andrew Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union, on Siga’s board of directors.

Smallpox was eliminated as a live disease from the entire planet over 30 years ago. The only known specimens of the virus are said to exist in Russian and American government labs.

The use of smallpox by our enemies is amply deterred by our own possession of it, as well as by our nuclear weaponry.

Even supposing someone attacked us with smallpox, we already have a billion-dollar supply of effective vaccine on hand — enough for the whole country.

This existing vaccine costs $3 a dose.

Siga’s vaccine costs $255 a dose, i.e., 85 times more than the existing vaccine.

Siga’s vaccine lasts only 38 months, while the existing vaccine lasts for decades.

When the Department of Health and Human Services resisted the ludicrously overpriced vaccine, Obama appointee Dr. Nicole Laurie put a new person in charge of negotiations with the company.

After that change, Siga received a “sole source” contract, meaning that it was the only company asked to submit a bid.

Even though the contract was supposed to go to a small company, and one such outfit, called Chimerix, wanted a shot at the project, and Siga (since it is affiliated with a large company) didn’t meet the criterion, Chimerix was frozen out.

So, because of Obama’s political connections, we are paying nearly half a billion dollars for nothing.

A feculent business, indeed.

About this Author

Gary Jason is an academic philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. His recent books, Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues and Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy are both available through Amazon.

Blue-Suited Vultures and Childlike Demands

Margin Call is another offering in the growing list of movie dramas and documentaries that attempt to explain the economic meltdown of 2007–08. This one gives an insider's view of a giant financial institution — perhaps a Lehman Brothers, although that company is never identified — as its analysts suddenly realize that it can no longer sustain its high levels of margin-driven debt against its falling asset values.

The film opens with a cadre of blue-suited vultures — most of them women — storming the office to let employees go. At the end of the day, nearly half of them have been fired, including middle manager Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci). Dale has been working out a logarithm that seems to be predicting financial catastrophe, but no one will listen as they usher him out the door. This scene is perhaps the most intense of the whole movie. Women literally tap men on the shoulder and signal for them to follow, an action reminiscent of the Rapture that will herald the beginning of Armageddon. It is hard to say which is better — to be summoned away, or to be left behind to face destruction.

As a parting gesture, Dale tosses a flash drive to his protegé, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) and warns him to be careful. Sullivan opens the file, and after adding a few mathematical computations of his own, discovers that the company's net worth is less than the debts it owes. Considerably less. And with the multiplier effect caused by buying on margin, the gap will widen exponentially in a matter of days, unless the markets as a whole turn around. An emergency meeting is called, with all the corporate bigwigs arriving in the middle of the night.

Here the film becomes heavy with pointed dialogue intended to explain the problem to those of us in the popcorn gallery. It is not unreasonable to assume that every one of these high-powered business people in this high-powered room is a genius at math and finance. Yet CEO John Guld (Jeremy Irons), sinister in his impeccable gray suit, his impeccable British accent, and his frighteningly sharp face, threatens Sullivan, "Speak to me as you would a child, or a golden retriever." This childlike demand is designed for the audience's benefit, of course, but it is almost laughable in the circumstances and reveals J.C. Chandor's inexperience as a writer and director. He doesn't yet know how to set up exposition believably.

The explanation that Sullivan then delivers is so abstract and obtuse that only someone who already understands it would be able to fill in the missing specifics and render it understandable to others. We know that the company has borrowed too much against assets that are diminishing in value, but we don't gain any further light from having seen this movie, and we certainly don't learn anything about how to prevent a similar meltdown.

Films such as "Margin Call" continue to garner glowing praise while vilifying an economic system that allowed America to become the wealthiest, most powerful, and most generous country in the world.

More interesting are the ethical conversations that follow. After Guld reminds the Board of his motto of success: "Be first, be smarter, or cheat," he adds, "I don't cheat, and we aren't any smarter, so we will have to be first." This means that his brokers will have to sell all their assets within hours of the market opening in the morning, before buyers realize that the asset values are dropping.

Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), a 34-year veteran of the firm, offers the free-market answer to government regulation when he argues, "But you'll be selling something you know is worthless. They will never buy anything from you again." He's right, of course. The greedy businessperson looks for the quick profit that comes from offering inferior quality at an inflated price, then hurriedly moves on. But the wise businessperson offers good quality at a fair price, knowing that satisfied customers will provide steady gains from repeat sales for a lifetime. Cynically Guld gives the opposite view of the free market: "We'll be selling at the 'fair market value.' It's not our fault if the fair market keeps falling." Acknowledging Sam's point about repeat customers, he continues, "This is the big one. We have to get out all at once."

To entice brokers to destroy their own careers by ruining all their customer rapport and good will, the company leaders offer them huge incentive packages for unloading the majority of the company's assets by the end of the day. The brokers may not be able to get a job for a while, but with this kind of compensation, they won't have to. Integrity can't be bought, but it can be sold.

Karl Marx argued that those who deal in money deal in nothing. They don't produce anything of value, and they don't consume anything of value. They just provide a medium of exchange. Thus, in a Marxist view, being a salesman or stock broker is the lowest form of labor. This point comes through in the film when Dale laments, "I used to be an engineer. I built a bridge once." He then recounts how much time and energy he has saved for all the people who have used his bridge every day for years. The implication is clear: as an employee of this financial institution, his life has been meaningless.

Sam Rogers responds in a similar fashion when Guld says derisively, "You could have been a ditchdigger" instead of a wealthy financial analyst. "Yes," Sam agrees, "but then at least there would be some holes in the ground." Guld continues in Darwinian style, "It's just money; it's made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don't have to kill each other just to get something to eat. It's not wrong. And it's certainly no different today than it's ever been. . . . You and I can't control it, or stop it, or even slow it. . . .We just react. And we make a lot of money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the side of the road if we get it wrong."

This cynical attitude about the role of financial institutions is continuing to drag down our economy as surely as investing on margin did. It willfully ignores the fact that financial institutions provide capital for funding those bridges and ditch-digging projects. And it encourages viewers of films like this to ignore that fact. These films continue to garner glowing praise while vilifying an economic system that allowed America to become the wealthiest, most powerful, and most generous country in the world.

For a relative newcomer (this is his first full-length feature film) Chandor managed to do several things right. He secured major funding and assembled an all-star cast that includes not only Tucci, Spacey, and Irons but also Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, Simon Baker, Mary McDonnell, and many others. He has garnered accolades from the mainstream critics. He has written a script that, despite its schoolboy reliance on potty language (thus its R rating), has "gravitas." But while it may seem "important," it isn't very entertaining, or very thrilling. Interesting is about as high as my praise will go. His direction is often affected and heavy handed, especially with his actresses. Wait for Margin Call to be available on Netflix.

Jo Ann Skousen teaches classic mythology and Bible literature at Chapman University. She is the entertainment editor for Liberty and founding director of the Anthem Libertarian Film Festival at FreedomFest, which she co-produces with her husband, Mark Skousen. Her recent book, Matriarchs of the Messiah: Valiant Women in the Lineage of Jesus Christ, offers a bold new look at women in the Bible.

More Thoughts on Green Energy

Look, I apologize — okay? — but this story just won’t stop. I know that I’ve written a fair amount on crony green capitalism, but more things keep propping up, and the mainstream media keep ignoring them. They have made green energy their shibboleth. So those of us in the alterative media just have to step up to the plate.

First, some recent material on the most notorious “green energy” scandal: the Solyndra case. Solyndra was loudly touted by the Obama Regime as a “jobs machine,” and its chief investor was a billionaire leftist Obama fundraiser. This “company” was given a half-billion bucks in taxpayer-backed loans, after which it went belly up. The Republicans in the House of Representatives have been trying to get all the information on the scandal, but they are naturally facing a White House stonewalling campaign. The Democrats in the Senate, led by Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has his own ties to the corrupt green energy program, are ignoring this issue.

The House served a subpoena on the White House for all its internal emails about the company. The White House is obviously frightened of those coming to light. An early release of emails showed that very high officials in the Regime knew Solyndra was in trouble even as the Regime was looking at plans to shovel it more taxpayer-backed loan guarantees; the subsidies were given, nonetheless. The emails caused the Regime considerable embarrassment, and it is clearly worried about more unfavorable publicity. So it is practicing what the Nixon Watergate cover-up hatchetman had called a “modified, limited hang out.” That is, it has released some highly redacted emails, but with crucial information omitted, and has refused to release all pertinent information.

More recently released emails show that the Department of Energy (DOE) put pressure on Solyndra to squelch an announcement that Solyndra planned worker layoffs and a plant closing until after the election.

That’s right. Solyndra’s CEO warned the DOE on Oct. 25, 2010 that because the wretched company was running out of cash, it planned to lay off employees on Oct. 28. He noted that reporters had apparently learned the company was in trouble. In an email of Oct. 30, advisers to Solyndra’s main investor note that the DOE has pressured the company to put off the announcement until a day after the Nov. 2 midterm elections. The email says, “DOE continues to be cooperative have indicated that they will fund the November draw on our loan (app. $40 million) but have not committed to December yet. . . . They did push very hard for us to hold our announcement of the consolidation to employees and vendors to Nov. 3rd — oddly they didn’t give a reason for the date.”

That last sentence indicates that the unnamed author of the email was either an idiot or a comedian.

These emails and others reveal a level of coordination between the company and the DOE that can only be called crony capitalist collusion.

Now let us mourn the demise of yet another “promising” green energy company — one I haven’t mentioned before — Beacon Power. I know what you’re thinking: why lament the passing of another startup company? Don’t 56% of all new companies fail in the first four years, Jason? What part of Schumpeterian economic theory don’t you understand, the “creative” part or the “destruction” part?

Now that’s a great return on your investment: pay less than a hundred grand, and pocket $400 million in return.

The reason you should mourn, dear friend, is that more of your tax dollars were spent on this boondoggle. Yes, Beacon Power got a tidy $43 million in taxpayer-backed loan guarantees from Obama’s DOE, and it has just filed for bankruptcy.

Then again, there is the chipper, choice news that another solar company, Colorado-based Abound Solar, received $400 million in (as always with this corrupt regime) taxpayer-backed DOE loan guarantees. Now, I know this will shock you, but one of the major investors in Abound Solar was a big financial backer of — Obama!

In a story that abounds in irony, though not in legitimate profits, one of the major investors in Abound Solar — a creature delightfully named Pat Stryker (as in, striking at our tax dollars) — “bundled” $87,500 for Honest Barry. Now that’s a great return on your investment: pay less than a hundred grand, and pocket $400 million in return.

And I must not omit the news about Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s, sly crony capitalist deal. This story has been unearthed by the keen eye of Peter Schweizer, who has an expose of the morass of crony capitalism our nation has become in his new book, Throw Them All Out.

Kennedy made his name as a big booster of green energy (except, of course, in his own backyard). His company, BrightSource, snagged a very tidy $1.4 billion bailout from Obama’s DOE. Apparently, though the details are still murky, this bailout — a DOE taxpayer-backed loan guarantee — was arranged by a key DOE employee who had only recently worked for Kennedy’s company.

The central player may have been Sanjay Wagle. He was one of the owners of BrightSource, and he raised money for Obama’s 2008 campaign. Upon election, Obama appointed him to the DOE as an adviser — on energy grants! Pretty convenient for the company, no?

At the time it requested the loan, BrightSource was a basket case, with $1.8 billion in debt, losses of $71.6 million, and a lousy $13.5 million in revenue.

The corruption these stories reveal is truly Nixonian. But there is a difference between Nixon’s and Obama’s corruption. The mainstream news media were interested in exposing Nixon’s (because they loathed him), but aren’t in the least interested in exposing Obama’s (because they love him).

For the record: this whole green energy loan guarantee program was approved by George Bush, and was dramatically increased by Obama with so-called stimulus money. Can we all not now agree just to kill the whole freaking stupid program?

About this Author

Gary Jason is an academic philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. His recent books, Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues and Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy are both available through Amazon.

Some Thoughts on Sharia Law

I can’t say I’m in favor of dripping acid into peoples’ faces — but, given the right circumstances, I might appreciate the opportunity. I got to thinking about this back in the summer when Amnesty International called upon Iran to revise its penal code.

Sharia law provides for retributive justice and the retribution in question was made available to a woman named Ameneh Bahrami who’d been blinded when a creep named Majid Movahedi threw acid into her face after she refused to marry him. Outside of being a good judge of potential husbands, Ms. Movahedi holds a degree in electronics and held a job at a medical engineering company. She seems to be an accomplished woman who, even in the Islamic Republic, had a really bright future.

Now it seems that she doesn’t have much of a future at all. I hope I’m wrong about this, but it’s hard to imagine how any blind person could hold down a job in engineering, or how anybody as brutally scarred as Ms. Bahrami is going to have much luck finding a husband to take care of her. What she did have was the opportunity to visit Mr. Movahedi while he was strapped onto a hospital bed and pour acid into his eyes. For a long time, she wanted to do it, and I can’t say I wouldn’t have wanted to, also. Then Amnesty began to put the squeeze on her to back off, Ramadan and the time of forgiveness came around, she forgave and, from looking at the beaming pictures of her scarred face, it’s easy to see she feels pretty good about the decision. Think what would have happened in a similar situation in America.

For starters, the crime wouldn’t have been against Ms. Bahrami. It would have been against the State, and she would have been nothing more than a witness, if the judge had even allowed her to testify, because it’s easy to see a defense lawyer convincing a judge that the mere sight of her scarred face was too inflammatory for the jury to be allowed to see.

Even if she were allowed to testify, it’s not hard to imagine the same defense attorney convincing a jury to acquit on the ground that, since she was blind and all, her ability to identify her attacker simply wasn’t good enough to dispel all reasonable doubt that the guy who’d thrown the acid really was the same man sitting here in court.

Perhaps the prosecutor would be worried about getting a conviction, or just have too many trials to handle, and let Mr. Movahedi plea-bargain his way down to, say, second-degree assault and get off with time already served. No matter how things shook out, Ms Bahrami’s feelings would have had no bearing on the outcome.

I prefer the way the Iranians handle this. I like it that Ms. Bahrami is the one who not only got to decide what happened to Mr. Movahedi, but would have been the one to do it to him.

Or not. Either way, she was the one who got whatever emotional satisfaction there was to be gotten from the situation. I also don’t mind thinking about Mr. Movahedi spending something like the seven years he spent in prison waiting for Ms. Bahrami make up her mind about whether he got the acid treatment.

What Ms. Bahrami did have was the opportunity to visit Mr. Movahedi while he was strapped onto a hospital bed and pour acid into his eyes.

Or, take an example that’s a little closer to me, personally. A few years ago my nephew was riding home on his bicycle. He had just been licensed as a civil engineer, and he and his father were about to launch into business together. He was, when I think about him, the best that his generation, the best that America, had to offer. He was smart and hardworking; he had a beautiful bride, a winning personality, and a glorious future — all of which ended when a middle-aged driver fell asleep, ran onto the shoulder where my nephew was riding, and put a stop to everything except his life with massive brain damage.

The thing was, it was probably the worst day of the driver’s life, too. She showed up at the hospital, sick with grief. And wasn’t allowed to see him. The lawyers thought it was a bad idea. She showed up repeatedly and never got into the room. Always the lawyers.

The boy’s father is a kind, generous man who would have given comfort to the driver, if he had been allowed to. And she to him. But they weren’t permitted to meet. Instead, the only satisfaction he got was to drive out to the highway and look at his son’s blood puddled on the asphalt. And the driver had to watch her trial grind its way through the legal system with no concern for whether the boy she had hit, or his family, even wanted her to be on trial.

Now, imagine if something like this had happened to an American in Oman in the mid-Seventies. It did. To a good friend of mine, only he was the driver.

Three years earlier, no Omani who wasn’t either in the military or the royal family even owned a car. In fact, no Omani even owned sunglasses. The sultan was opposed to things Western. Then he was deposed and the next sultan began to modernize, so the road my friend was driving along was brand new. And the old gentleman standing on the side of the road was newer still to the whole concept of high-speed traffic when he stepped out in front of my friend’s car.

My friend slammed on the brakes, spun the wheel, fishtailed, caught the old man with the rear of his car, then rolled four or five times before coming to a stop. The court my friend had to explain himself to was Sharia: a single judge with a council of elders to advise him.

I mean it when I say that my friend had to explain himself. Nobody got to have a lawyer. The old man spoke, my frind espoke, the police told what their accident investigation had found, the judge consulted with the elders, the village sat in a semicircle and listened, and the judge announced his decision:

To the old man, he said, "Our country is changing and you need to pay attention to those changes. By stepping into the road in the way you did, you have embarrassed a guest in our country."

To my friend, the judge said, "It appears that there was nothing more you could have done to have prevented what happened. I instruct you to pay the old man three rials." Rials were worth about $2.50 at the time, so my friend was ordered to pay seven-and-a-half bucks.

Nobody thought the rials compensated the old man for whatever injuries he had received. That wasn’t the point. The point was dignity. Regardless of how it happened, the old man had been hurt and my friend had been involved. The rials were for honor and, I am almost sure, for my friend too. To clear the books in his conscience as well as to make the old man feel vindicated.

Clearly, the lady who ran down my nephew was a lot more culpable than my friend, but ask yourself. If you had been either driver, would you rather have hired an expensive lawyer to try to justify your actions to a jury chosen at random from voters’ lists and then, if you did get off, perhaps face a trial for civil damages until you were bankrupt from attorneys’ fees? Or would you rather have told your story to a council of wise old men? I know which one I would choose.

About this Author

Bill Merritt is a sometimes novelist living in Portland, Oregon. It is not believed that anything he has ever written for Liberty has had the slightest influence on anybody in power.

Playing the Race Card

Whenever President Obama gets in trouble the leftists love to play the race card and accuse his enemies of hating him because he is black. Jimmy Carter, among others, is guilty of this, and other leftists regularly accuse Tea Party patriots of being racists. So let’s see whether this theory withstands logical scrutiny.

People say that racism is about “hate” and “bigotry.” These, however, are mere empty slogans. If you look at history, you can discern a central motive that generally explains racism. Here I will draw upon the theory of social biology, which seeks to explain human social structures, e.g. marriage, by reference to each organism’s drive to maximize the spread of its genetic material. A race is a collection of humans who evolved in roughly the same geographic area and are therefore related to one another more closely than to members of other races. Members of racial groups use racism to promote the survival of their DNA at the expense of other genetic blends.

If this theory of racism is correct, then the solution to racism is for humans to stop thinking like animals, who only care about the survival of their DNA, if that, and to start thinking like human beings, who care about individual happiness and fulfilling one’s potential as a reasoning mind. If people were to do this, then interracial marriage would become far more common, and 500 years from now everyone would be a member of the same global race, which would end racism for good.

Now let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the ideas in a person’s mind come from his or her thoughts and decisions and not from DNA. Then, if we concede that a “culture” consists not only of art, music, and food, but also (and most importantly) of ideas and concepts and the style of thinking that they embody, it will become evident that culture has no direct relationship to DNA. If that is so, then a race and a culture can be associated only by accident, and there is no causal relationship such that, for instance, black DNA causes black culture.

A racial culture is chosen by the members of a race, and it is not an expression of their DNA, although the culture that parents teach to their children can have a strong impact on the culture of the next generation. These observations underscore Thomas Sowell’s brilliant argument that members of oppressed racial minority groups might best be served by reforming their culture on the model of, say, Jewish culture, which has shown itself capable of overcoming oppression and achieving affluence.

So at last we come to the great fraud of racial leftism: the argument that if you oppose an idea that is thought to be implicit in, for instance, black culture, you are therefore a racist. From here all the modern-liberals need to do is argue that leftism and Marxism are intrinsically tied to black culture, and they can make an argument, quite logical within the context of their faulty premises, that everyone who opposes the Obama agenda is an anti-black racist. This is the trick that Obama, whom some regard as the Ace of Hearts, has up his sleeve. You can expect him to lay it on thick by accusing the Tea Party and Republicans of being white supremacists during the 2012 election campaign.

But as Ayn Rand said, “Check your premises.” Yes, there may be groups of bigoted whites in the deep South who vote Republican and also like white DNA more than black DNA (although even to suggest this is to engage in discriminatory stereotyping). Nobody knows how Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry really feels about blacks, although I am confident that Ron Paul is not a racist. But what in the world do white racists in the South have to do with economic theory? If you do not accept any causal link between racial DNA and cultural ideas, and if you reject the absurd and insulting notion that socialism favors dark-skinned people (see my essay on racism in Liberty, August 2010), then this racist argument is nonsense. Pull out the premises that form the foundation of the argument, and Obama’s house of cards collapses.

About this Author

Russell Hasan is Chief Software Engineer of Chosen Roads, maker of the online dating site and online career networking site Car Keys (www.chosenroads.com). He lives in Connecticut and follows the New York Yankees.

The Bowels of the Occupy Movement

According to its website, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a people-powered movement organized in "response to the Great Recession caused by our financial and political leaders." It vibrates with activity as people organize against corporate greed. Working groups pulsate, "planning actions, coordinating with community groups, engaging with the press, supporting each other, and strengthening solidarity within the movement." They intend to work tirelessly until inequality, injustice, poverty, and war are eradicated, all the while "refusing to be silenced," presumably by powerful movements clamoring for inequality, injustice, poverty, and war.

The early days of the OWS movement experienced rapid growth, its popularity boosted by media coverage and support from celebrities and Democratic politicians. In recent weeks, it has been joined by labor unions, community organizers, human rights groups, and the Communist, Socialist, and Fascist parties. Implying a form of automatic enrollment for everyone whom big business and big government has been sticking it to, the hope is that the "99%" name will increase membership to, well, 99%. There is also a small, but vocal, anti-Semitic faction, no doubt formed from the belief that Jews own all of the banks. And since OWS demands "indictments and prosecutions of all crimes committed by banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies," a very large legal faction is expected to develop soon.

Much of the anger is understandably directed at our democratic-capitalistic system. But a poll conducted for the movement by CUNY sociologist Héctor R. Cordero-Guzmán found that 70.3% of OWS'ers are politically independent and 64.2% are under the age of 34. That is, most probably don't vote. The poll also found that 92.1% had some college, a college degree, or a graduate degree; 13.1% are unemployed; and 71.5% earn less than $50,000 a year. So most OWS'ers are highly educated and have jobs, but almost 85% (13.1 + 71.5) pay 0% in income taxes — in contrast to, for example, Tea Party members, who are old and uneducated, but pay 30% of their income in taxes.

In addition to Wall Street and the 1%'ers, OWS'ers hate big corporations, especially ones that make huge profits, ship jobs overseas, and "plunder the planet." During a working group debate, one protestor tweeted "X on sucks" to his followers by using his new $560 iPhone 4S. I assume he was talking about Exxon, a giant American oil company with a profit margin of 9.66%. Apple, which recently surpassed Exxon as the world's largest company, extracts a profit margin of 35% on iPhones, which are manufactured by Samsung in Taiwan. Evidently, big corporations that screw consumers can get an OWS protest exemption if they make cool products.

Similar logic applies to people. Corporate CEOs are demonized because of their sinfully high salaries. True, the top ten CEOs averaged $43 million in 2010. But the top ten celebrities averaged $100 million. Instead of castigating them, however, OWS'ers pay them tribute, by purchasing exorbitantly priced tickets to attend their bourgeois movies, concerts, and sporting events.

Despite numerous anti-capitalist signs (e.g., "End Capitalism" and "Smash the Pillars of the Pig Empire") and an equally large number of signs advocating socialism and communism, the OWS movement insists that it doesn't want to destroy business; it just wants to make a few changes. Specifically, it wants American business to hire more people, increase salaries and benefits, provide free health care and education, reduce the prices of products and services, and eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The profits (if any, after all the wealth-sharing) should be returned to society. So the new system would be a hybrid in which capitalists could own businesses but control neither their property nor their profits. Let's call it Marxalism.

Self-respecting socialists cannot be expected to carry their clever anti-capitalist signs while shivering and holding their noses at their own fetor.

Nationwide demonstrations by rebellious youth may annoy and disrupt American business, but they are unlikely to cause an immediate, voluntary switch to Marxalism. Nor will they result in a swift enactment of anti-greed laws. The real leaders understand the futility of such languid tactics. They are professional radicals, hiding in the bowels of the movement — deep thinkers for whom class warfare is a full-time job. They are the friendly statists from ACORN-like orgs, whose anti-capitalist outrage calls for social revolution. And they want it before ADHD and cold weather drive demonstrators back to their jobs and classrooms.

To ignite a revolution, the movement needs rebellious leaders with the ability to rouse and incite the masses. Who should be the provocative face of the revolution? Given the number of protestors wearing chic T-shirts imprinted with the image of Mao and Che Guevara (not to mention Marx, Lenin, and Stalin), it would be tempting to use modern-day versions of these idols. However, Che-like leaders would be demoralizing. The original Che denounced the “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible” and those who “choose their own path” as "delinquents." Chairman Mao has become a cult hero, perhaps more trendy than Che. California even has "Mao's Kitchen" restaurants. But it would be difficult for Mao-like leaders to explain the miserable failures of the original Mao — for instance, the "Great Leap Forward" to create a just, egalitarian society that ended up killing 45 million innocent Chinese men, women, and children. As with Che's idol, Stalin, justice and equality were evidently unimportant goals for Mao.

There are even problems with frontmen such as Michael Moore. On the plus side, he is highly visible and somewhat popular, has no history of supporting mass murder, and has never been seen in a Che T-shirt (although he has endeared himself to Fidel Castro). A recent convert to the OWS movement, Mike hates capitalism, which he regularly and vehemently denounces. He often alludes to violence in the streets if Wall Street doesn't pay back what it has stolen: our pensions, our money, and the futures of our children. But the spectacle of Michael Moore raging against corporate fat cats would hardly ignite a revolution. And a T-shirt image of a fat 57-year-old man, with bangs sticking out from under a goofy ball cap, is simply ridiculous.

In terms of the stated goals, two months of demonstrations have achieved nothing. As the OWS movement has grown and spread, so too has its proclivity for violence and revolution. Writing in the New York Post of a recent visit to Zuccotti Park, Charles Gasparino "found a unifying and increasingly coherent ideology emerging among the protesters, which at its core has less to do with the evils of the banking business and more about the evils of capitalism — and the need for a socialist revolution." Unfortunately, the latest recruits to the cause — for the most part, criminals, drug users, panhandlers, and the homeless — have produced little more than a stench pervading the carnival-like encampments. Indeed, the increasing violence and decreasing sanitation of the movement has begun to wear out its welcome in many cities. And with the onslaught of winter, many protestors plan to retreat, vowing to return with the fair weather of spring. Self-respecting socialists cannot be expected to carry their clever anti-capitalist signs while shivering and holding their noses at their own fetor. Besides, it is an image more ridiculous than that of a Michael Moore T-shirt.

In the bowels of the OWS movement lie zealous agitators who see themselves as its true leaders. Privately they regard the mainstream media, vocal celebrities, and shrill professors of socioeconomic equality as useful idiots. When it comes to money and power, they are as greedy and exploitative as any of their oppressors. By offering false hope and fomenting hatred and unrest, they seek to extort capital and usurp power for themselves. And with thousands of eager demonstrators at their disposal, they believe their moment is now (or next spring).

But there is an obstruction, a chronic irritation — the lack of charismatic demagogues to articulate the ideology. Some would say the movement has been stricken with irritable bowel syndrome. Alas, for this strain, no medicine seems to be available.

About this AuthorSteve Murphy is a retired missile defense systems engineer and software developer living on top of Green Mountain in Huntsville AL, where he does a little consulting, plays the stock market and writes — mostly about economics, science, and American life. He can be contacted at sfm@hiwaay.net.

Big, Fat Hypocrite

Prominent at various Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, lending his overweighty support to the decorticated descamisados raucously protesting and polluting the parks, is famous Marxist millionaire Michael Moore. He’s as hard to miss as a bellowing beached whale. He is there to rail against the wicked rich, the “1%” who are such a bane to mankind.

But confronted by an interviewer who had the temerity to point out the obvious hypocrisy of Moore’s bashing of the upper 1% while being in that very group himself, Moore tried gamely to deny — while keeping a straight face — that he was part of the 1% being vilified. The irrepressibly cheeky Andrew Breitbart has posted pictures of Moore’s huge, obscenely lavish new lakefront mansion. Moore’s gorgeous place, on the shores of Torch Lake, Michigan, is officially assessed at roughly a million bucks, but the joint is probably worth much more. Homes on the lake range from $400,000 to $3 million, and his is one of the newer, bigger properties. Michigan property tax assessments are set at roughly half the market value of the property, so figure it to be worth $2 million.

Yes, an upper-1% kind of joint.

Ah, but this delicious dish of hypocrisy has more layers. Not only is the “manse” worth multi-millions, but it is in a township with no black residents. This leftist toad lives in a segregated community, whose inhabitants are 98% white.

Add another layer to the poser cake: this is just his summer home! Mr. Man of the Peeps has other massive properties as well.

Quite a dish to stomach, indeed.

About this Author

Gary Jason is an academic philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. His recent books, Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues and Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy are both available through Amazon.

Poisoning the Well

Young people are getting an education on the free enterprise system that prejudices them against it.

Their educators tend to see its ethos as one of “dog eat dog.” They believe that fierce competition is its only feature, and that this competition must always be destructive. They believe that some will win and others lose, and that the winners must completely obliterate the losers.

Kids learn that lying in business is sharp and shrewd. That successful businesspeople use every dirty trick in the book to get ahead. That, given the nature of the system, they absolutely must do this to succeed. Dishonesty may be considered wrong everywhere else in the world, but in the workplace it is a skill necessary for survival.

Of course this is the detritus of Marxist philosophy. Even at its mildest, it is not what people who esteem the free enterprise system, who support it as the one most conducive to freedom and prosperity, believe. But youngsters who aspire to succeed in business tend to believe these things, because they’re what’s being taught. They carry such notions into the business world, and this accounts for the abysmal lack of ethics we see in all too many of them.

People who notice this bad behavior are often told that “that’s business,” and believe it. Thus they are vulnerable to the rhetoric of “progressive” political hucksters who preach warmed-over Marxist ideas such as the redistribution of wealth and the supposed necessity of government intervention in the marketplace. And thus does the vicious cycle perpetuate itself.

But among those who care about free enterprise, there is a sense of what, for lack of a better word, I might call sportsmanship. While at one level a business competitor may be a rival, in the larger scheme he is actually a partner. You might defeat him today, he might defeat you tomorrow, but next week you might succeed together. As for customers, they are not suckers to be bamboozled; they are every company’s greatest resource. A continuously profitable business doesn’t try to fool them once, then go in search for other suckers; it establishes a mutually beneficial, long-term relationship with them.

The economic chaos we face today didn’t spring full-blown from Obama and the Left. It is the product of both major parties, and the years of confusion over which they’ve presided.

An understanding of these principles is almost totally absent in the minds of many young folks in the corporate world. And this has opened a Pandora’s box of ills. It has much to do with why tycoons pay expensive lobbyists to get legislation passed forcing competitors out of business. It’s why big corporations gobble up struggling small fry and — with the help of bought and paid-for elected officials — strangle other entrepreneurs in regulations that keep them from building better companies. It’s how so many of them can thrive on taxpayer-funded subsidies, then congratulate themselves on their commercial genius. Such tricks are then described, by anti-free enterprise professors, as capitalism in action.

What the young are not being told is that there is a beauty, balance, and wisdom to the free enterprise system. That it can thrive only in an atmosphere of trust, based on individual integrity and mutual respect. That it is up to each of us to keep that trust. It’s true, we all compete, but only so we can become our best. And if personal dishonesty becomes too widespread, it will undermine and erode our ability to trust one another.

The well is being poisoned right at its source. William F. Buckley raised an alarm about the fouling of this spring in his first bestseller, God and Man at Yale, more than 50 years ago. His warning is as timely now as ever. We are paying small fortunes to educate our sons and daughters, and they are being taught to distrust the very waters in which they must swim. They are being taught that the only way to clean them up is to pay self-designated geniuses to regulate the flow. What will happen is that the pool will dry up.

I spent my early college years at public institutions, and I remember being taught that the system in which I had to survive was evil. Then I transferred to a small, private college, and for the first time I heard that the economic system developed in my country had become a blessing to the whole world. For the first time, from professors not beholden to socialist dogma, I was exposed to a gospel of hope. It was many years before I was able to sort through the confusion of those conflicting doctrines and find my way to the truth. Kids today are confused, too, but they are as salvageable as I was.

They won’t hear the truth from the GOP-led Right. That crowd preaches free enterprise, yet feeds into the corruption and calls the bitter sweet — at least until the Democrats are in charge. The economic chaos we face today didn’t spring full-blown from Obama and the Left. It is the product of both major parties, and the years of confusion over which they’ve presided. Most of our would-be leaders learned from the same kind professors who now teach our kids, so they are no less befuddled.

Competition can be healthy. It can make us grow. But it can also be sick and deranged, goading us to tear each other apart, which is what happens when people compete for money and economic privilege that are taken from others and given to them. Thus Solyndra enjoys half a billion dollars provided at the expense of taxpayers who are losing their own jobs and homes. But there are still examples out there of beneficial competition in action, of good people working to keep our country great. I suspect, however, that Washington DC is the last place we’re going to find them.

If we can be made to believe the bad press about free enterprise — whether it comes from academia, from Hollywood, from the news media, or simply from our friends—we will act according to such notions. We’ll lie, cheat, and try to rig the game, and no one will have any cause to trust us. This was how the well got poisoned to begin with. The economic system that made America great needs better public relations. But we can’t merely entrust the job to any self-styled expert. We must, each and every one of us, take it up ourselves.

We must stop subsidizing schools that sow destruction. There are good schools, and responsible professors, who still teach the principles that can save us. There are still candidates, and voters, who care passionately about liberty. This is no time for passivity or despair. It is time to speak up, and to practice what we preach with greater fidelity than ever before. Our kids are watching every move we make to see how closely it corresponds with our words.

In the break room at one of my many corporate jobs, there was a poster promoting carpooling. It showed a throng of cars packed into a traffic jam. In each was a single driver, and from every driver’s head came a thought-balloon saying, “I can’t make a difference.” Although this was government-funded “green” propaganda, and the phrase has, unfortunately, become a cliché, it carried a grain of truth.

Each of us can make a difference, because although we are individuals, we are not alone. But we are individuals, and we are each responsible for ourselves. The great cleanup of the well can only begin with us.

About this AuthorLori Heine is a freelance journalist and playwright from Goldwater country. Her work is most often seen in the LGBT Christian magazines Whosoever and The Epistle.

End the Green Nightmare

There is currently a maelstrom of news about costly failures in the so-called green energy industry. Of course, solar power is prominently featured, and the Solyndra fiasco is only one of the scandals. Rapidly rising to public consciousness is another crony capitalist solar company, SunPower, which looks like it too will go bust and cost the American taxpayer a fortune. Also in this club of losers are solar companies such as First Solar and Abengoa, both again the recipients of taxpayer dollars, thanks to the current administration’s rigid environmentalist ideological mindset.

But not to be overlooked are disappointments in the other segments of the green energy industry. Corn-based ethanol has proven to be such a wasteful boondoggle that even Al Gore has rethought his support of it. And wind power has come in for a good deal of scrutiny. Why, even geothermal companies are proving questionable. A recent report of three on the biggest such companies — Nevada Geothermal Power, Raser Technologies, and U.S. Geothermal — shows that they are all in financial difficulty or are just not profitable. All are recipients all of taxpayer loans or loan guarantees.

This has left the proponents of green power trying desperately to explain away its dismal failure — both here and abroad — to prove itself commercially viable without massive governmental subsidization, and without the corruption that governmental subsidies typically bring. But while we are witnessing the bursting of the Great Green Energy Bubble, we are also witnessing a renaissance of fossil fuels — the very fuels that Malthusian prophets of doom have for decades claimed are “running out.”

This renaissance has been caused by a technological revolution that is transforming oil and gas drilling. Because of it, oil and gas are far more plentiful here and in countries outside the Middle East and other hostile neighborhoods, such as Russia and Venezuela. I am thinking especially of two technologies, fracking and horizontal drilling. The rebirth of fossil fuel production was unimaginable a few years ago. It is completely beyond the ken of the Greens who constitute the Obama Regime, people who never anticipate revolutions that are not run from above, by them, but instead originate in the distributed intelligence of regular (read: creative) people.

We are also witnessing a renaissance of fossil fuels — the very fuels that Malthusian prophets of doom have for decades claimed are “running out.”

Start with fracking. It has certainly made some energy companies rich. For, example, Noble Energy has just paid a whopping $3.4 billion for a half-interest in the Marcellus Shale holdings of Consol Energy. Together they plan to develop a huge chunk of Pennsylvania and West Virginia (663,000 acres). Even after selling off half its holdings, Consol still expects to extract a massive 350 billion cubic feet of gas.

What is fascinating is that Conrol Energy is a Pennsylvania-based coal company — you know, one of those, well, fossils of the fossil fuel industry. It is nicely positioning itself for the inevitable shutting down of coal-fired power plants under the relentless pressure of the EPA. Consol and Noble are just two of the flood of companies moving in to develop the Marcellus Shale formation.

Fracking is also rewarding key players in the industry. Marcus Rowland, the CEO of the small but important player, Frac Tech International, earned a tidy $24.4 million last year. His compensation made him the highest paid CEO of any publicly-traded energy company. He is paid more than the CEO of IBM.

Frac Tech is beating many other energy companies by providing hydraulic fracturing services for big energy companies such as Chesapeake Energy and ExxonMobil. It brought in nearly $1.3 billion in revenues. In the world of fracking, only Halliburton and Schlumberger are bigger.

There is a very recent report about the development of a shale field of truly stupefying proportions. The Utica Shale deposit is an enormous geological formation stretching from Quebec to Kentucky. It may be an even more fertile source for oil and gas than the Marcellus Shale field. Ohio state geologists — a neutral source, please note — estimate that Ohio’s share of this field holds upwards of 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 5.5 billion barrels of recoverable oil (or roughly a third of the production of America’s largest oil reserve, Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay).

Then there is brilliant article discussing one of the unsung creative geniuses of American industry, Harold Hamm. In a week dominated by paeans to the fallen Steve Jobs — who rightly deserved recognition for his amazing success in making Apple what it is — it was nice to see a piece on the remarkable Mr. Hamm.

Far from welcoming the renaissance of the American fossil fuel industry and the jobs it would provide, the Obama Regime has fought it tooth and nail.

Hamm is the founder and CEO of Continental Resources. He rose from humble origins — the thirteenth child of Oklahoma sharecroppers — to become thirty-third on the current Forbes list of wealthy Americans. Yes, Virginia, there is a Horatio Alger. Hamm is almost certainly going to rise to a much higher place on the list, given how much oil he owns.

He made his early success as a wildcatter with a keen sense of where oil could be found. But his greatest contribution was his early employment and improvement of a second innovative fossil fuel technology, a method called horizontal drilling. This is a technique whereby the drilling company drills downward (up to two miles deep), then drills outward, horizontally. This technology has — as dramatically as fracking — allowed energy companies to exploit petroleum and gas reserves hitherto not commercially viable.

Hamm is the discoverer of the famous Bakken oil field that extends from Montana to North Dakota. So fertile has this field proven that it has helped put America back in third place in the world in oil production. He estimates the reserves in Bakken alone at 24 billion barrels — which if true is double our currently proven national reserves. Continental has seen its proven reserves go from 118 million barrels in 2000 to 421 million barrels this year.

One might expect that the Obama Administration would be delighted at the prospects of America’s becoming energy independent — and potentially millions of American blue-collar workers getting high-paying jobs.

But one would be wrong.

Far from welcoming the renaissance of the American fossil fuel industry, the Obama Regime has fought it tooth and nail. It is attacking shale oil and gas with every tool at its disposal. Its Department of the Interior has undertaken a jihad against them. It has locked away from exploration and development vast new areas of the Midwest and has waged a war against conventional offshore drilling. It is now doing its best to stop the new technological drilling, even in lands that have been drilled conventionally before.

The Green Regime’s SEC has entered the fray, demanding that companies like Continental follow new Sarbanes-Oxley requirements about reporting royalty and production figures, meaning that CEOs like Hamm face jail time if some low-level operator misreports production from a field.

Ironically, the feds never apply Sarbanes-Oxley to themselves. If Obama or any of his administration misreports taxpayer liabilities, say, for solar industry loans, nobody faces any consequences.

In addition, the Regime is pushing de facto tax increases for the oil and gas industry, by ending various tax credits the oil industry has long enjoyed. This — coming from an administration lavish in its subsidies to minor and expensive energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, and ethanol — is from the point of view of physical science simply bizarre.

Finally, the Green Dream Team has brought its Justice Department into the jihad. It recently brought charges against seven oil companies in North Dakota for killing 28 birds. Continental has been accused of killing — one bird! But this is not a minor matter: the executives face six months in jail if convicted. (Note: The same Justice Department has never even once pursued any American wind power company, even though American wind power facilities kill on the order of half a million birds a year.)

But even as the Regime wages its jihad against domestic fossil fuel industries, other countries are moving ahead with the new fossil fuel technologies. As I noted in an earlier piece, Israel has set about using fracking to free itself from reliance on foreign sources of oil, which would mean changing the balance of power in the Middle East. Israel is using fracking to exploit some major fields, the most recent being a field (named “Leviathan”) which holds 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or about a century’s worth of gas at Israel’s current usage. This field is only part of the massive Levant Basin shale field, which holds upwards of 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or about eight centuries’ worth.

More recently, a small energy player in the UK has announced that the Bowland Shale field, in northwest England, contains an estimated 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This estimate (by Cuadrilla Resources) means that this one shale field contains enough natural gas for two-thirds of a century of the UK’s needs at present levels. And that is only one field.

The British boom is being echoed elsewhere in Europe, where other countries are also turning to fracked gas — except France, which has outlawed shale gas exploration altogether, one suspects to protect its nuclear industry from competition. But Poland, for instance, has an estimated 187 trillion cubic feet of shale gas. This is geopolitically game-changing, considering that Poland now has to import its natural gas from neighboring Russia, a country that historically has kept trying to incorporate Poland into its empire.

Note the extremism of Banks’ demand: don’t even explore, much less try to use, resources until they are proven, to her ilk, to be perfectly safe—something that will never happen.

This discovery in the UK comes just in time to stop its increasing dependence on natural gas from the Middle East and Norway. But — naturally — the British energy suppliers are facing the same kneejerk environmentalist opposition that Hamm and other American suppliers do. Soi-disant environmentalists in Britain are roused in furious opposition. Jenny Banks, the “energy policy officer” for the environmentalist group WWF (World Wildlife Fund) demands, “The government should at the very least halt shale gas exploration in Britain until more research can be undertaken on both the climate-change impacts and contamination risks associated with shale gas.” Note the extremism of her demand: don’t even explore, much less try to use, resources until they are proven, to her ilk, to be perfectly safe—something that will never happen.

What explains this visceral hostility to a product the human race desperately needs, and the pushing of forms of energy that have proven time and again to be commercial losers?

The answer is that much of the environmentalist movement consists of two groups: neo-socialists, and neo-Romantic pagans. The former profess a love of the ecosystem but are really animated by a hatred of capitalism. These are the people who never uttered a peep about environmental degradation when the Soviet Empire was cheerfully despoiling the ecosystem, but who now wax furious at the thought that a capitalist — a capitalist — should even explore for oil. Should Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chavez start using fracking, why, instantly, fracking would be fine.

The second group, even more bizarre, is populated by those I have characterized elsewhere as self-loathing hominids, i.e., people who are ideologically misanthropic. They view their own species as vile and disgusting, literally a blight upon the planet. The thing they fear most is precisely the discovery of inexhaustible, inexpensive energy. They fear it because such energy would allow the human race to flourish, and these self-loathing hominids do not want the human race to flourish. To them, rats and roaches are wonderful, but children are not.

You simply can’t please these worshipers of Thanatos.

But the rest of us should rejoice in the renaissance of fossil fuels. Unlike the green energy sources that have done so pathetically little to help humanity, it holds the promise of inexpensive energy on which our continued prosperity depends.

About this Author

Gary Jason is an academic philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. His recent books, Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues and Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy are both available through Amazon.

Unsubstantiated: Without Substance

In Katherine Mansfield’s one-act play Trifles, trifling evidence such as a reticent personality, a half-cleaned table, a broken birdcage, and a canary with a broken neck lead the audience to conclude that a woman has murdered her husband. Motive and opportunity. That’s all it takes to find her guilty in the eyes of her peers. The play is written with a delicious sense of irony and poetic justice. My students at Sing Sing don’t buy it, however. “That’s just circumstantial evidence!” they complain. “You can’t convict on that!”

They’re right, of course. Motive and opportunity — and sometimes opportunity alone — once led to a vigilante justice system that culminated in countless lynchings in our nation’s history. Compounded by a healthy dose of police-induced false witness, it continues to lead to wrongful incarcerations today.

Motive, opportunity, and false — or at least unsubstantiated — witness lie at the heart of Clint Eastwood’s new film, J. Edgar. Eastwood has created a kind of wrongful incarceration inside a film that will stand as an unending sentence. Instead of relying on what is known about J. Edgar Hoover’s public life, Eastwood chose to focus on the very private life that was always hinted at but never confirmed. Books have been written about Hoover, but the conclusive evidence is missing. Even Eastwood acknowledges in this film that Hoover’s official biography may have been full of inaccuracies. The people who might have known the facts are dead, and the famous confidential files that Hoover collected over the years no longer exist. Writers can speculate about their contents, and they have. In print. But no one actually knows.

Hoover’s greatest legacy was his insistence on using evidence-based science to investigate crime. He recognized, for example, the value of using fingerprints, ballistics, and marked money to identify criminals. If he were alive today, he would cheer the use of DNA evidence. His was a bureau of investigation first and foremost.

“J. Edgar” ought to be one of the most fascinating and powerful films of the year. Instead, it is overlong, underinteresting, and often just plain creepy.

His not-so-great legacy was his willingness to trample constitutional rights in his march to justice. He was determined to protect America from political subversives, kidnappers, and organized crime rings. To do this he needed to create a public outcry that would (to paraphrase Ben Franklin) make additional security seem worth the cost of essential liberty. Several early scenes in J. Edgar emphasize Hoover’s disregard for constitutional rights. Again, if he were alive today, he would probably be at the forefront of Homeland Security and the TSA.

With Eastwood as director, Leonardo DiCaprio as actor, and the most influential law enforcement leader of the 20th century as its subject, J. Edgar, which opened this weekend, ought to be one of the most fascinating and powerful films of the year. Instead, it is overlong, underinteresting, and often just plain creepy.

Much of the creepiness comes from the way Eastwood portrays Hoover's relationships with his mother (Judi Dench); his secretary, Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts); and his lifelong friend and right-hand man, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). Fighting crime gets short shrift in this film that focuses on speculations about Hoover's private life. Eastwood pays very little attention to Hoover’s work in the Bureau, except to show how Hoover manipulated public opinion about crime to federalize the FBI and expand his power.

Arrests of notorious criminals in the 1930s are presented as photo ops for Hoover. The Kennedy assassination is mentioned, but receives less than two minutes of screen time. The Lindbergh kidnapping weaves throughout the plot, mostly to demonstrate Hoover’s conflict with states’ rights, but the tone regarding the kidnapping is strangely detached and unemotional. Even the bombing of private homes by anti-American groups in 1919 is presented as an exercise of free speech.

But what of the private life on which this film dwells? Much of what is “known” about Hoover’s private life is based on hearsay and innuendo, motive and opportunity. The film is unable to settle on a clear point of view. Was Hoover a homosexual? Possibly. He never married. He had a close relationship with Tolson, who also never married. But Hoover’s lifelong secretary, Helen Gandy, never married either. Does that make her a homosexual as well? Or simply a woman dedicated to her job, as Hoover always claimed to be?

And why should his private relationships matter, anyway? My biggest concern about this film is that, after deciding to establish that Hoover and Tolson were lovers, Eastwood pulls back, suggesting that they weren’t lovers after all. He presents their relationship as awkward, creepy, and heartless. There are plenty of scenes to suggest homosexuality: Tolson significantly passes a white hanky to Hoover at their first meeting (an anachronistic reference to a code that seems to have developed in the early 1970s); they hold hands in the back seat of a car; Tolson tells Hoover, “I want us always to have lunch and dinner together,” almost like a fiancé setting down the rules. And yet, when Tolson kisses Hoover, at the culmination of a physical fight reminiscent of those awful 1950s movies when a man would often slap a woman into erotic submission, Hoover responds furiously, “Don’t ever do that again!” What gives? Either they are seeing each other romantically or they are not. I think Eastwood was trying to portray Hoover’s own conflict over his homosexuality, but it gives the film itself a decidedly homophobic tone.

Even creepier is Hoover’s relationship with his mother. Hoover's father is portrayed as suffering from psychotic paranoia. His mother is domineering and flirtatiously predatory. She parades her new gowns for him, dances with him, buys a diamond ring for him. He is controlled by her and obsessed with her. Judi Dench is at her best in this role, and if this were a fictional film about fictional characters, I would say bravo. Chances are that having a mother like that would indeed lead to psychosexual deviance. But the problem here is that Eastwood is portraying as fact scenes that can only be speculative. And he is suggesting that homosexuality is a psychosexual deviation.

Eastwood was trying to portray Hoover’s own conflict over his homosexuality, but it gives the film itself a decidedly homophobic tone.

An additional source of creepiness is in the prosthetic makeup used to age the characters as the plot moves back and forth between the 1970s and the 1930s. Armie Hammer, in particular, looks like he is dressed as an alien for Halloween, or for a skit on Saturday Night Live. The prosthetic material does not move like skin, and the liver spots that dot his forehead and face are hideous. Hammer is so handsome and debonair as the young Tolson that it comes as a shock each time his character moves into the 1970s.

Much has been written about Hoover’s secret life, and rumors have entered the realm of “everybody knows.” But secrets are just that: secrets. Hoover's confidential file is legendary, in the true sense of that word, but no one knows what was actually in them, because all the files were destroyed by Helen Gandy as soon as he died. But this lack of concrete evidence has not prevented authors, journalists, and filmmakers from speculating on their content.

It is an understatement to call J. Edgar Hoover a complex man. He was a fierce patriot who saw nothing wrong with deporting naturalized citizens exercising freedom of speech. He was a crime-fighter who broke laws to fight crime. He is quoted as saying, “Sometimes you have to bend the rules a little in order to protect your country.” He was a man with an enormous ego fed, perhaps, by private demons. He may have been a hypocrite who vilified homosexuals while engaging in homosexual acts himself. But to quote my Sing Sing students, that’s all circumstantial evidence. The only people who actually know the truth are dead. Eastwood’s film convicts J. Edgar by demonstrating a possible motive and a definite opportunity, fueled by probable false witness. In the process he has created a film that is homophobic itself.

At 137 minutes, J.Edgar is long. It isn’t suspenseful. It isn’t interesting. And it isn’t reliable. If you want to see a film that presents a more reasoned, though still critical, portrait of Hoover, I suggest you rent Public Enemies (2009) instead.

Jo Ann Skousen teaches classic mythology and Bible literature at Chapman University. She is the entertainment editor for Liberty and founding director of the Anthem Libertarian Film Festival at FreedomFest, which she co-produces with her husband, Mark Skousen. Her recent book, Matriarchs of the Messiah: Valiant Women in the Lineage of Jesus Christ, offers a bold new look at women in the Bible.

Homes for Green Jobs

It's difficult finding good green jobs today, even after $110 billion in stimulus money has been spent to help create them. Newly formed green energy companies such as Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, and Green Vehicles are going out of business and newly converted green energy companies such as General Electric are outsourcing manufacturing jobs to cheap-labor countries.

Nevertheless, many in government, especially the White House and the EPA and DOE, believe there will be plenty of future green jobs to go around — 5 million high-paying jobs, according to President Obama. The reason for their optimism may lie in the expectation that millions of Americans will soon make a transition to energy efficient homes. Although the parts and materials may be manufactured in other countries, the houses must be built and maintained here.

This optimism has, no doubt, been buoyed by the 2011 DOE-sponsored Solar Decathlon, a competition among collegiate architectural teams "to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive." The picture belowshows the excitement surrounding the program (all pictures: USDOE). To be fair, the Decathlon got off to a rainy start — good neither for attendance nor electricity generation. However, the inclement weather obviously failed to detract from the beauty of these earth-friendly, sustainable homes. A government source, who wishes to remain anonymous, exclaimed that he "envisioned entire communities of these cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive dwellings sprouting up throughout the land. The demand may exceed that of wind farms."

Such innovative designs underscore the wisdom of government programs spending hundreds of millions of dollars to train people for the coming green economy. Clearly, existing builders are not able to construct such ecological marvels, as advanced as they are beautiful. Indeed, to non-green tradespeople, even the new building codes will be incomprehensible. And remodeling companies and do-it-yourselfers will be sorely unqualified to handle renovations and repairs. But, a government source, who wishes to remain anonymous, predicted that "when millions of Americans begin to abandon their inefficient and wasteful homes for these cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive dwellings, a highly paid green energy workforce will be at the ready."

The offering in the forefront is from the California Institute of Technology, one of our most prestigious engineering schools. As can be seen in the enlarged, twilight view below, its parka-esque look (siding from LL Bean?) exudes warmth. And if the house becomes too warm (retains too much captured solar radiation), there's no better way to cool off than to luxuriate in the crisp (and now cleaner) sunset air whisking across your spacious deck. There, you can sink into an eco-friendly folding chair and ponder your energy savings while enjoying a panoramic view of our planet healing.

The Cal Tech house and the other contenders will seem diminutive and trifling to people with that antiquated "a man's home is his castle" attitude. But, as a government source, who wishes to remain anonymous,hastened to recall, "the goal of the competition is to demonstrate cost-effectiveness, energy-efficiency, and attractiveness." Consumers desiring bigger homes could simply purchase an enlarged version of their favorite design or integrate multiple units into a structure of the required size.

This latter option is more easily implemented with rectilinear structures such as the City College of New York design below. The CCNY offering is 750 square feet. A young couple seeking a starter home need only purchase two units and have them contiguously integrated into a 1500 square foot home, much like bolting together two double-wide mobile homes. The inherent flexibility of this modular approach permits end-to-end or side-to-side bolting. And, as the family grows, additional units can be readily attached. According to a government source, who wishes to remain anonymous, "this should be performed by properly trained, authorized and qualified green energy technicians."

There is no question that all the teams have done a great job improving energy efficiency. For example, the CCNY house is able to create up to eight kilowatts of free energy on sunny days. Purchasers of these homes will reduce their electricity bill by hundreds of dollars annually, thereby shrinking the time needed to recoup their solar investment.

The CCNY house costs $500,000 for materials. A conservative estimate of labor cost would be $125,000 (25% of the materials cost). With green labor, $200,000 (40%) is more realistic. Throwing in another $100,000 for the building lot and other expenses brings the total to $800,000. In this scenario, the young couple's 1500 square foot starter home would cost only $1,500,000.

Let's assume the couple comes up with the $300,000 (20%) down payment and can afford the monthly mortgage payments (perhaps by the time they are ready to buy, they will have high-paying green jobs). Further assume that their resulting energy savings are $2,000 a year. Their investment recovery time would therefore be only 150 years (for the down payment, of course). Imagine the recovery times of the designs from teams that failed to qualify for the Solar Decathlon.

Such calculations can be misleading because they fail to account for green goodwill, an intangible but saleable asset representing the value your investment contributes to saving the planet. It is saleable in that you can add it to the future selling price of your home. A government source, who wishes to remain anonymous, explained, "It is an additional amount that a prospective buyer, equally ignorant and gullible, would be willing to pay for your cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive solar home."

title=

About this AuthorSteve Murphy is a retired missile defense systems engineer and software developer living on top of Green Mountain in Huntsville AL, where he does a little consulting, plays the stock market and writes — mostly about economics, science, and American life. He can be contacted at sfm@hiwaay.net.

Parents and Children

The Way is a quiet film with a quiet soundtrack that emphasizes the quiet introspection of its main character, Tom (Martin Sheen). But do not equate “quiet” with “boring.” This is a compelling film with a compelling story, told against the backdrop of the beautiful Pyrenees.

Tom is an ophthalmologist who has trouble seeing things clearly. He has chosen a traditional path for his life: He attended a respectable college, entered a respectable career, and reared what he thought would be a respectable family. His son, Daniel (Emilio Estevez), has taken a different way. “I want to see Spain, Palau, Tibet!” he exclaims to his father during what will be their last day together. “Come with me,” he pleads. But Tom is too practical. He has his ophthalmology practice to consider. Leave for two months or more? Just to wander along a mountain trail? When he shouts back about choice and accountability, Daniel responds tersely, “You don’t choose a life, Dad. You live one.”

The two part angrily, but it is abundantly clear that Tom loves and misses his son. In one early scene, Tom’s receptionist informs him that Daniel has left a message while Tom was busy with a patient. Tom’s disappointment is palpable. “Did he leave a number this time?” he asks anxiously. “Do you know where he is?” Any parent who has been estranged from an adult child knows this feeling and can relate to Tom’s despair.

The next phone call is the one no parent ever wants to receive: Daniel is dead. While setting off to walk across the Pyrenees along the Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile pilgrimage also known as “The Way of Saint James,” Daniel was caught in a freak storm. Tom must fly to Spain to identify the body and bring Daniel home. When the coroner suggests that cremation is an easier way to transport the body back to America, Tom decides that he will help Daniel complete the journey by walking the path himself and depositing a handful of Daniel’s ashes at each way station.

Along the way Tom meets several other pilgrims, each traveling The Way for seemingly practical reasons. Joost (Yorick van Wagengingen) is a jovial Dutchman who simply wants to lose weight for his brother’s wedding. Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger) is a flirtatious cougar who wants to quit smoking at the end of the journey. Jack (James Nesbitt) is a journalist looking for a good story.

All these characters have deeper spiritual conflicts that they have avoided facing. The film becomes a journey of introspection, self-discovery, and companionship as they travel not together, exactly, but side by side. Tom’s self-deception is perhaps the most pronounced, and he makes the deepest discoveries. Several times Tom sees Daniel, or imagines he sees him, in a crowd or on a hill, encouraging him and urging him forward. Daniel’s great desire was for Tom to accompany him on this journey. By dying, Daniel has found a way to make it happen.

The Way is a film about the relationship between a father and a son, made by a father and a son. Emilio Estevez, who wrote, directed, produced, and performs in The Way, seems to be Sheen’s less wayward offspring. One can’t help but think about the heartache Sheen must be experiencing in real life as he has watched his more celebrated son, Charlie Sheen, blow up in public over the past year. The younger Sheen was finally fired from his successful TV show, “Two and a Half Men,” because of problems associated with accusations about drugs, alcohol, and extramarital sex. The elder Sheen’s own heartache as a father is apparent in his portrayal of Tom, a man tortured by the way he said his last goodbye to a son whose way of life he did not approve. He plays the role with restraint, but his body language and facial expressions effectively convey his character’s deep emotions.

Tom tells himself he is walking The Way for Daniel, but as one pilgrim wisely tells him, “You walk The Way for yourself. Only yourself.” This is true of life, of course. We make the life we live. Another character tells Tom, “I wanted to be a bullfighter. My father wanted me to be a lawyer.” He blames his father for his failure to choose a more satisfying path, but it was his own choice to put his father’s approval ahead of his own happiness. The essence of good parenting is to provide protection and opportunity without forcing children into a way that is not their way. And above all—never say goodbye in anger.

Jo Ann Skousen teaches classic mythology and Bible literature at Chapman University. She is the entertainment editor for Liberty and founding director of the Anthem Libertarian Film Festival at FreedomFest, which she co-produces with her husband, Mark Skousen. Her recent book, Matriarchs of the Messiah: Valiant Women in the Lineage of Jesus Christ, offers a bold new look at women in the Bible.

Is the Arab Spring a Winter for Women?

President Obama backed the rebels in Egypt, abandoning our longstanding (and admittedly loathsome) quasi-ally Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptians in the street were, after all, demanding their freedom . . . or so it was presented. When Mubarak fell, Obama of course congratulated himself warmly.

However, some people were nervous at this spectacle. Especially nervous were people who recalled Obama’s spiritual guru, Jimmy Carter, who decided to abandon support for the Shah of Iran to help usher in the new “forces of democracy” there. The result was not democracy, but an even more authoritarian regime — indeed, a totalitarian one, driven by an Islamist ideology and implacably hostile to the United States.

Recent events in Egypt have ominously suggested that we may be seeing a similar devolution there, with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood looking to take control.

A recent story is both a disgusting and worrisome harbinger. It tells the story of a Cairo businessman trying to decide whether or not to “circumcise” (i.e., mutilate the genitals of) his daughter, who is — 12 years old! This procedure is a happy custom endorsed by many conservative Egyptians, and Mubarak’s regime struggled to suppress it. But with the winds of the Arab Spring, it is resurgent again.

Female genital mutilation (given the euphemistic acronym “FGM”) involves removing most or even all of the clitoris, and even the labia minora, followed by stitching up the vaginal opening.

All this, to make sure that young women remain chaste and “pure.” It is already incredibly common in Egypt, and is now likely to become even more so.

The Mubarak regime had banned the practice after a young girl died from it, and Suzanne Mubarak (the dictator’s wife) had spoken out continuously against FGM and had gotten religious leaders to oppose it. But the Muslim Brotherhood opposes the Mubarak ban, and it now appears that prior progress will be rapidly reversed.

We can only wonder what other treats are in store for Miss Liberty as the New Egypt evolves.

About this Author

Gary Jason is an academic philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. His recent books, Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues and Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy are both available through Amazon.

Did You Build Grand Central Station?

On Sept. 29, President Obama gave a TV interview in which he said, “The way I think about it is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft and, you know, we didn't have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades. We need to get back on track."

Notice that when the president said that “we need to get back on track,” he didn’t mean that “you and I” need to do so. He didn’t mean that he had lost his competitive edge during the past 20 years and needed to reform himself. He meant that you had lost your edge. The I he reserves for such statements as “I’m going to be signing an executive order today,” or “I urge Congress to move forward,” or “I need to win elections so I can become my own father.” (That last statement is something that he’s never actually said but that he has probably, poor man, always felt.)

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh published a book about his solo flight across the Atlantic. The book was called We. The reference was to Lindbergh and his airplane, The Spirit of St. Louis. Those two were “we.”

Please imagine the effect if he had called the book I. Even Ayn Rand changed the name of her second novel from Ego to Anthem. If you want to call a book I, it had better be your autobiography. (And it had better be good.) But Lindbergh’s book was the story of his exploit, not the story of himself. Without the plane, he wouldn’t have had the exploit. His title showed appropriate courtesy to the plane.

Now imagine the effect if he had gone in the other way and called the book We, the American People. That wouldn’t have been discourteous. That would have been preposterous. It wasn’t the People who crossed the Atlantic. It was Lindbergh and his plane.

I’m not talking about metaphysical issues. I’m talking about literary effects. But there are certain large areas of American life in which neither metaphysics nor aesthetics are understood. The chief of these areas is politics. In this field, we is now one of the most common terms, and it is almost always misplaced — misplaced in a way that is shocking both to fact and to intellect.

As usual, President Obama provides the reductio ad absurdum. Here is what he said during his “give me money and I will create jobs” tour, on Sept. 22, in Cincinnati:

Now, we used to have the best infrastructure in the world here in America. We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad, the Interstate Highway System. We built the Hoover Dam. We built the Grand Central Station.

So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads? And let Europe build the best highways? And have Singapore build a nicer airport?

Andrew Malcolm, reporting on the president’s speech (Los Angeles Times, Sept. 23), asked a “quick question”: “Has anyone ever heard any American express jealousy over Singapore's sweet airport?” That’s a good question, but it’s not the important one. The important question is, Who is this we, anyhow?

I don’t remember having built any dams or train stations, and I’ll bet you don’t either. Obama’s we is simply a way of inciting people’s emotions by confusing their ideas about how things get done. We the people don’t raise capital, draw up plans, and pour cement. We may pay taxes or buy train tickets, but we can’t take the credit if a train station turns out to be a work of art, or take the blame if an airline terminal looks like a prison, but without the charm.

It should be noted that “we” is not a term of agitation simply on the Left. It is also a weapon of the Corporate Power — you know, that “1% of the country that owns 99% of it.” This putative 1% appears to consist mainly of oil companies, and they are fighting back, in their feckless way, with commercials in which simulacra of ordinary people say obnoxious, accusatory things — things like, “The oil companies are making a lot of money. Where does it go?” — and then are answered by the unsurprising news that the companies invest the money they make, thereby creating jobs. But many of the obnoxious statements refer to the alleged energy shortage. These take the form of hysterical outbursts such as, “We have to do something about this!” or “We gotta get on this now!”

But there are certain large areas of American life in which neither metaphysics nor aesthetics are understood. The chief of these areas is politics.

None of the average citizens whom Chevron depicts as looking up from their busy lives to demand that something bedone is portrayed as having any professional qualification to do something himself. We the people aren’t up to that. So the greasy oil company spokesman is free to step in and proclaim that certain other we’s, we the energy experts, are indeed doing something with those invested profits, something to better the lives of everyone, etc. It’s a contest between one we and another, which puts it on a very high intellectual level indeed.

I find it painful even to notice nonsense like this, so I’ll be content with one more example. A big, thumping, classic example. A confused person named Julianne Malveaux (who used to be visible pretty frequently on television, when television was an entirely leftwing venue), once posted a favorable review of a popular book about religion and morality, in which she made these comments: “Still, I could not read the book without wondering how [the author] or anyone else would expect morality in a nation of thieves. How could we expect our political leaders to be honest when we stole from the Indians, enslaved the Africans, interred [sic] the Japanese, disenfranchised the Chinese, conscripted labor from the Mexicans and so on and so on and so on.”

Clearly, Dr. Malveaux does not consider herself a part of this nation of thieves, or she wouldn’t trust herself to discuss its morality. Yet somehow she can’t avoid using we and our, thereby confessing herself to be a dastardly American after all. Having seen this nice lady on TV, I can hardly picture her forcing Chinese (presumably Chinese Americans) away from the polls, persecuting Mexicans by “conscripting” their labor (huh? when did that happen?), or enslaving Africans — much less burying the Japanese. By her account, however, she has done all these things, and is also several hundreds of years old.

Silly as it is, this kind of rhetoric is increasing. It is growing even faster than the national debt — although formerly, even the worst orators tried to avoid its worst excesses. But whenever I say things like that, I try to check them against Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural address (1965), which I regard as a standard by which bad writing can be measured. Bad, worse, worst: this speech is one of the worst things ever written. (I’ve discussed a few of its features before, in "The Great Man Speaks," Liberty, April 2009. I haven’t talked about any of its good features, because there aren’t any. ) So how is we handled in Johnson’s speech?

Johnson makes some borderline uses of the first person plural — innocuous generalizations about “we” as “we” are today: “Under this [the exact referent isn’t clear, but it’s meant to be something that happened, or maybe didn’t happen, sometime in American history] covenant of justice, liberty, and union we have become a nation — prosperous, great, and mighty. And we have kept our freedom. But we have no promise from God that our greatness will endure. We have been allowed by Him to seek greatness with the sweat of our hands and the strength of our spirit.” Blah, blah, blah. Yes, we don’t know what God has in store for us. This is perfectly true and fully supported by fact. Most of Johnson’s other we statements, however fallible or flaky, are also observations about current reality, about what we supposedly see now:

For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say “Farewell.” Is a new world coming? We welcome it — and we will bend it to the hopes of man.

To this we can only respond, “When was it that we said farewell to our world?” I, for one, can’t recall any worlds disappearing. And I know I never contemplated bending a new world to the hopes of man. Sorry, can’t picture that. But even baloney like this isn’t as bad as the oil company ads, which insist that we actually start doing something to bend the world, or the Malveaux review, which insists that we (you and I!) once actuallydid something like that, but it didn’t turn out very well.

Nevertheless, there is a disturbing parallel between Johnson’s speech and the more modern remarks I’ve been analyzing. It comes in the following paragraph, where Johnson says:

No longer need capitalist and worker, farmer and clerk, city and countryside, struggle to divide our bounty. By working shoulder to shoulder, together we can increase the bounty of all. We have discovered that every child who learns, every man who finds work, every sick body that is made whole — like a candle added to an altar — brightens the hope of all the faithful.

The Simpsons has the First Church of Springfield. America at large has the First Church of All. One of its dogmas is that all of usare always learning helpful things about all of us. For example, we learned to work shoulder to shoulder (now there’s a fresh expression), because we discovered that competition (the “struggle to divide”) doesn’t “increase the bounty of all.”

This notion goes a long way toward explaining America’s melancholy political history from the 1960s until now. No politician ever opens his mouth to say that we were once taught to believe that we should work shoulder to shoulder, but that now we know we were wrong, because competition increases the bounty of all. But that’s the plain, though unutterable, truth.

Somehow Malveaux can’t avoid using “we” and “our,” thereby confessing herself to be a dastardly American after all.

One thing we plainly did not discover, because it is patently absurd, is that everyone benefits from everything good that happens to everyone else. If this is what every child who learns is learning (and I’m afraid it is), then we are in serious trouble. But in case you haven’t noticed, we are in serious trouble, and it’s because some people actually accept the ridiculous assumptions behind these ridiculous uses of every, all, and we.

I hate to say it, because it seems so fundamentalist, so retro-libertarian, but this also is true: what I’ve been discussing here is collectivism, pure and simple, and collectivism is a very bad thing. Not only is it economically harmful; it’s destructive of thought, and today it is more prominent than ever in America. There is nothing more common than the linguistic collectivism that was planted in President Johnson’s idiotic remarks about “the hope of all the faithful” and now blossoms in President Obama’s amazing idea that we (of course including he) somehow constructed the Hoover Dam and summoned Grand Central Station out of the primordial ooze. Yet on this false conception, this linguistic folly, has been erected the vast framework of modern socialism, the system of thought and action that is now imperiling the future of us all.

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution. Newly published is Culture and Liberty, a selection of works by Isabel Paterson.

From “Reinvest” to “Occupy”

The “Occupy” movement attacks only the superficial side of the problem. It’s like blaming the gardener, instead of the weather, when the flowers die.

Times are hard and our first impulse is to indict what is right in front of us, namely, banks, corporations, the people who have made money by merely observing and accurately interpreting the idiocy around them — people who have taken advantage of the economic distortions to make money.

Banks, corporations, and wealthy people happily obeyed the Community Reinvestment Act, passed by Congress, and used the cheap money created by the Fed to make obscene profits in the five years or so before 2007. Since that time, they have made even more profits by borrowing short-term money at almost zero interest rates, forced into the economy by the Fed, and investing in long-term Treasuries at 3%, the so-called carry trade. If there is a trough, there will be pigs.

The government is the ultimate source of the misallocations that have and probably will continue to impoverish “the 99%.” “Occupy” and its supporters who “believe,” in their government-school-induced darkness, that the government can “save” them from evil “capitalists” seem to be screwing their heads into a socket that produces very little light.

About this AuthorErwin Haas lives in Grand Rapids, where he writes, films videos, and plays at Libertarian politics.

How Green Were My Cronies

One of the signature issues of the Obama administration has been “green energy.” From its first day in office, the Green Regime has attempted to get America to convert to the so-called “renewable” sources of energy: biofuels (especially corn ethanol), geothermal power, wind power, and solar power.

Behind its ideological commitment to green energy, however, is a solid core of self-interest. It gets a huge amount of financial support from environmental organizations, and a large number of wealthy environmentalists. It is using its funding and regulatory power to reward these donors, giving them not only psychic benefits but also material ones.

In short, it is green for the green.

This crony green capitalism has two sides: a regulatory side (negative) and a subsidization side (positive). Both sides are needed, because “renewable energy” sources are seldom even remotely price competitive with fossil fuels. Not only must they be subsidized by government, because private investors are reluctant to put up their own money for them, but they can become saleable only if the government drives up the cost of fossil fuels by piling up regulations on fossil fuel production.

The regulatory side of crony green capitalism is the administration's jihad against all fossil fuel industries. It has locked away vast parts of the continent from oil and gas drilling, and has fought the new fracking technology tooth and nail. It has set loose the EPA with the goal of ending the use of coal, and has severely restricted drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. And it is opposing even the exploration of the US continental shelf.

The flip side is the lavish subsidization of so-called green energy sources, especially wind and solar. It is here that the play for pay game gets frisky. A flurry of recent reports about who has gotten these taxpayer subsidies dramatically increases the stench of corruption that emanates from the Regime.

It is hard to know just where to begin, but we can start with Solyndra, that striking piece of rentseeking dreck Obama boasted would create tons of jobs. We first learned that the billionaire who backed the company, George Kaiser, was a big donor to and “bundler” (i.e., a collector of donations ostensibly from others) for the Obama campaign. Kaiser’s company Solyndra was given a half-billion dollar loan guarantee by the Green Regime’s Department of Energy (DOE), structured in such a way that if the company hit the wall, the American taxpayer (as opposed to the billionaire bundler) would be liable for the loan. And hit the wall it did.

The regulatory side of crony green capitalism is the administration's jihad against all fossil fuel industries.

Well, now we learn that the entrepreneurial genius, Kaiser, this bien-pensant billionaire who wants so very much to help his country — paid zero income taxes for years. He did this by buying companies that had unrealized losses that he could then use to wipe away his personal income taxes. Kaiser is an interesting pal for a president who has shown deep fondness for bashing “millionaires and billionaires” for not paying “their fair share” in taxes.

It also turns out that an advisor for the loan program that shoveled the cash at Solyndra was — by an astonishing coincidence — a huge Obama fundraiser. This fellow, Steve Spinner, raised over a half-million dollars for Obama. And he is also — by an even more astonishing coincidence — the husband of a lawyer whose firm represented the company during its application for the loan. Moreover, despite the fact that Spinner agreed in writing to stay out of the loan process, emails show that he was involved up to his eyebrows.

It has also come to light that RockPort Capital, one of Solyndra’s biggest investors (and a board member) used its seat on a Pentagon panel that exists to help the Armed Forces identify useful new technologies to push Solyndra on the military. While RockPort disclosed that it had an investment in Solyndra, it never mentioned that the latter was a financial basket-case.

We now also learn that at least four other solar energy firms that received massive loan guarantees had executives and board members who were big donors to major Democratic politicians. These companies include Abengoa SA, First Solar, SolarReserve, and SunPower Corporation.

Start with Abengoa, a Spanish company. (Spain, remember, embraced wind and solar as the key to a jobs renaissance a decade ago. But green energy proved a veritable economic Black Plague for a country that has massive state-induced financial problems.) It turns out that Abengoa has worked with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to get nearly $3 billion in loan guarantees from the Regime to finance Arizona solar farms.

First Solar, upon which the Regime has lavished over $2 billion in taxpayer-backed loan guarantees, is likewise a supporter of the self-same Regime. Its founder and CEO Michael Ahearn donated nearly $125,000 to Democrats in the last election. He cleared nearly $69 million by selling some of his stock last month, even though the company cannot qualify for another loan from the DOE. Ahearn is clearly using the guarantees to keep a shaky company afloat, even as he sells his personal stock. His $125k investment in crony green capitalism has paid off big time — $69 million — while the taxpayer faces a $2.1 billion hosing. No, no corruption there!

SolarReserve is even more choice. The aforementioned billionaire bundler Kaiser (the Solyndra genius) also owns a majority of this rotten company, which got a tidy $737 million taxpayer-backed loan guarantee from the DOE. His company, Argonaut, has a voting share on the SolarReserve board of directors. Another member of the SolarReserve board of directors is one James McDermott, who just happens to have given over $60,000 to various Democrats since 2008, with about half going to Obama’s campaign. McDermott’s company, US Renewable Energy Group, has also donated heavily to Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), who needs no introduction.

Moreover, another SolarReserve board member, Lee Bailey, is a lavish campaign donor to Regime members and other prominent Democrats. Not to mention the fact that yet another board member, Jasandra Nyker, is partners with the brother-in-law of Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in an investment company (Pacific Corporate Asset Management). And SolarReserve paid $100K in fees to a lobbying firm headed by Obama’s transitional team leader John Podesta, to push its loan and other interests.

Then there is SunPower, whose stock price has recently plummeted with its projection of losses for this year and next. It received a $1.2 billion taxpayer-backed loan guarantee, even after it announced that it would be building its solar panels in a new plant — in Mexico! So much for the idea that “green jobs,” paid for by Americans, would go to Americans.

SunPower gave $14,650 to Congressional Democrats in 2010 (and $500 to one Republican), with about a fourth of the money going to Reid. Oh, and the company paid nearly $300K to a lobbying firm headed by Reid’s close associate Patrick Murphy. Another major SunPower lobbyist just happens to be the son of Rep. George Miller (D-CA), who touted for the company in Congress, and publicity-toured its plant with the Regime’s interior secretary, Ken Salazar. The right honorable Rep. Miller also received funds for his own campaign war chest from the company in question.

SunPower, by the way, now has a market capitalization of only $800 million, not much in the face of corporate debt of $820 million, and is facing a mass of investor lawsuits. No doubt it will, like Solyndra before it, eventually hit the wall and hose the taxpayers.

In general, the solar energy boom is going bust, because it was solely a function of political, not market, forces. Taxpayer money was shoveled to economic losers, to enrich the crony capitalists who shoveled money at the Regime.

Let’s turn next to the latest news on electric cars (EVs). Start with the frisky Frisker fiasco.

Frisker Automotive is a Finnish company that makes pricey EVs — cars in the $100K range, sticker price, making them attractive to movie stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, but few others. Fisker was given — yes, you guessed it! — a $529 million dollar taxpayer loan guarantee from the Energy Department. No doubt pushing the idea was Reverend Al Gore, the Green Giant who is also a major investor in — Fisker! (Gore, by the way, has already earned tens of millions from preaching the environmentalist religion, making him eerily similar to a corrupt televangelist.) Also on the list of investors in Fisker Automotive are several big donors to the Obama regime, and also John Doerr, one of Obama’s advisors.

So much for the idea that “green jobs,” paid for by Americans, would go to Americans.

The Regime justified the loan on the usual lying basis, i.e., that it would bring jobs to Americans. Vice President and Chief Buffoon Joe Biden bragged that the Fisker loan would create “thousands” of American manufacturing jobs. But Fisker has just announced that because it couldn’t find any facility in America suitable for building its cars, it will build them in Finland. Again, so much for the idea that American tax dollars are bringing jobs to America. Oh, and Fisker's electric motor and batteries are made in China! All of these cars will get a $7,500 tax credit, meaning that the few rich buyers of the Finnish-made cars with Chinese-made innards will have part of the tab covered by average-incomeAmerican taxpayers. Comedy writers must have scripted this.

The kicker is that the Fiskers that were recently showcased in DC are not pure EVs, but hybrids, whose gas mileage is about that of an older model Ford Explorer.

By the bye, also receiving a similar-size taxpayer loan guarantee is Tesla Motors. Tesla’s main investors include Larry Paige and Sergey Brin, both Google-billionaires who lavishly supported Obama. So much for their corporate motto, “Don’t be evil.”

Then there is EnerDel, a maker of lithium-ion car batteries. Back in 2009, Obama doled out $2.4 billion in grants to battery makers to support EVs, including $118 million to EnerDel. Again, the insufferably dense Joe Biden saucily minced around two EnerDel plants in Indiana, boasting before cameras that the administration wasn’t only creating jobs “but sparking whole new industries.”

EnerDel, which has never turned a profit since its founding nearly a decade ago, closed the last fiscal year with a whopping $165 million loss, a mindboggling $100 million more in losses than it had reported previously. Its shares have plummeted 95% in the last years, down to a risible 27 cents a share. Nasdaq looks like it will delist the stock, and Ener1 — the parent company — has notified the SEC that it “is in the process of determining whether the company has sufficient liquidity to fund its operations.”

In short, it’s a goner, and when it goes, the taxpayer will again eat a big loss. This company was dicey all along, but the Regime still threw money at it — because it is only taxpayer money.

EnerDel also got huge support from the state of Indiana, promising 1,700 new jobs by next year and 3,000 in four years. Unfortunately, it only employs 380 people, and they look like goners, too.

The problem is obvious, at least to everyone but the cretins and corrupt clowns who populate the Regime: the market for EVs is and will remain tiny, given their inherent limitations.

Now, let’s look at wind power. First is the news that Obama went out this month to raise money with a “businessman,” a supporter of long standing, named Tom Carnahan. They chummed it up at a $25,000 a plate fundraising dinner for the Obama reelection campaign. (That has a sickening ring, doesn’t it?) Carnahan is another bundler, having garnered between $100,000 and $200,000 for Obama in 2008.

Al Gore has already earned tens of millions from preaching the environmentalist religion, making him eerily similar to a corrupt televangelist.

Yet by amazing coincidence, Carnahan is the head of a wind power company, Wind Capital Group, which just happened to receive $107 million in federal tax credits from the Regime. By the same kind of coincidence, Carnahan is part of the Democratic family that has long dominated the state’s political scene, and a brother of Congressman Russ Carnahan (D-MO).

Shepherds Flat is an 845-megawatt wind farm that will cost $1.9 billion. Of this, astoundingly, the DOE will pay the developers $490 million in an outright cash grant, and give them another $1.06 billion in loans. The developers are putting up only about 11% of the total cost, and — according to Carol Browner (the Regime’s own “energy czar”) and Larry Summers (its economic advisor) — they will reap a staggering 30% return on their investment. This compares very favorably with the average 7.1% that most utility companies receive on their projects.

And just who might these lucky “entrepreneurs” be? The biggest player is — wait, let the suspense build! — GE!, which is being joined by Google and a couple of other partners. Google, as I mentioned earlier, was a big donor to Obama’s campaign. And GE? It is headed by Jeffrey Immelt, whom Obama appointed head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. And he was a big donor to Obama as well, natch.

This is the same GE that has a market cap of $170 billion, earned $5.1 billion in profit last year, and paid no taxes at all. Did it really need the money?

The project is questionable on other grounds as well. It is being built in a region that is already experiencing electricity congestion (the region of the massive Bonneville Dam). CNNMoney reports that it will create only 35 permanent jobs, which works out to around $16 million per job. Not that GE really cares much about American jobs — it is shipping its medical devices division to China.

No, no corruption here. None at all.

By the way, geothermal is looking pretty putrid, too. Two large geothermal companies, Raser Technologies and Nevada Geothermal Power, both received massive taxpayer backing, and are both sucking wind — the same wind that the solar and the (literal) wind companies are sucking.

Raser Technologies received a $33 million grant from the DOE. After pissing away all that taxpayer cash, along with a couple of hundred million bucks in private investor cash, the company has now filed for bankruptcy.

And Nevada Geothermal — a favorite pet of Harry Reid — received $66 million in grants from the Department of Energy, as well as a nearly $99 million taxpayer-backed loan guarantee. But it has just revealed that it has never operated at a profit for even one lousy day, and that it, too, is facing oblivion.

Still another geothermal company, US Geothermal, received a $97 million loan from the Department in February of this year, even though its financial filing with the SEC shows it hasn’t made a profit — in four years. And the stocks of two other geothermal companies that also got DOE loans are down 60% to 80%. These are just some of the tidbits of recent news from the taxpayer-supported green energy front.

Now, every time I report on the green "capitalism" that has been shoved down the throat of the American taxpayer by this corrupt Regime, I get wails of tearful anger from its supporters. The wails are of two types.

1. I am told that Republicans (especially the Evil Bush) have also supported various green energy projects. So, for example, the aforementioned Raser Technologies was backed by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). I am aware of that, and I criticized Bush in these very pages for doing the same thing.

But please spare me the simple-minded faux equation of the past administration with this one. There are massive differences in scale and focus. Bush did fund some green energy projects, but never on this massive scale. And his administration allowed oil, coal, and natural gas to flourish, and took the heat for it. He was pilloried for being too fond of fossil fuels. He was portrayed in the mainstream press as a creature of the oil industry; and Cheney and Halliburton — God, we never heard the end of that. Bush at least tried to push everything. . . . I certainly would have much preferred that he had pushed, or freed up, only what works (fossil fuels and nuclear power), but his approach was certainly better than the present crusade against fossil fuels, inaction on nuclear energy, and a massive splurge in technologies that are proven losers, yet owned by supporters.

The problem is obvious, at least to everyone but the cretins and corrupt clowns who populate the Regime: the market for electric vehicles is and will remain tiny.

You have to be blind to all recent history not to comprehend that since Carter at least, the Democrats have been by far more focused than Republicans on pushing inefficient green energies. Granted, Public Choice Theory posits that all politicians (Democrat, Republican, Communist, or Libertarian) are self-interested, so will be prone to spend public resources to advance their careers. But the point here is that precisely because green energies are absolutely commercially unviable without subsidies, while fossil fuels are extremely viable, a fossil fuels based energy program won’t need much subsidization, so will leave less scope for paying off supporters.

Really, if Obama dropped hydrogen bombs on every major red state in America, these same apologists would squeal, “But Bush bombed Iraq!”

2. I am told that I am being “hyperbolic.” In no way, these Regime apologists yelp, can the Green Regime be compared to, say, that of Putin.

My response is to ask the reader, with all we now know of the crony car capitalism, the crony green energy capitalism, and the numerous other crony dealings between the Regime and its supporters over the last three years, whether the comparison isn’t just. You decide: am I really being hyperbolic, or are the supporters of the Regime being merely obtuse?

While entertaining that question, you might consider this point. What has come to light so far has come out basically from the investigations of the alternative media. The mainstream media have done very little to look into any of the Regime’s scandals (contrast the unremitting, endless investigations of Bush). The Republican-controlled House of Representatives held some feckless hearings on the Solyndra farce, and only saw Solyndra’s executives smirk and plead the Fifth. If there were — as there ought to be — Watergate-style hearings into the whole green energy boondoggle, as well as the whole Government Motors scam, just imagine (if your stomach can bear it) what would come to light.

it announced that it would be building its solar panels in a new plant rdquo; of American manufacturing jobs. But Fisker has just announced that because it couldn$2.4 billion in grants

About this Author

Gary Jason is an academic philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. His recent books, Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues and Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy are both available through Amazon.